Brian E Carpenter wrote:
1. ADs physically don't have time to read intermediate drafts oustide their
own Area. So while they may suspect that a WG is heading in a worrisome
direction, they aren't in a position to do much about it.
Folks,
I hope no one doubts the basic truth of Brian's observation. My own feeling, in
fact, is that expecting all ADs to read even the final draft is an excessive
burden. Either way, it leads to the basic question of how ADs can be informed
of the salient issues in a wg effort, long before an IESG vote?
Currently, wgs produce 4 things: charter, email list archive, meeting
notes/summary, and output documents (specifications or whatever). None of these
permits intelligent assessment of working group progress, by someone who is not
significantly involved in a wg's on-going effort, without making a massive
effort to review the archive and notes record. At best, the meeting summary is
good for incremental issues, not summarizing integrated design (or syntax, or
operations, or...) decisions.
Given that working groups operate over many months or years, it seems like we
need something that is a work-to-date design/decision summary.
If a working group's effort is solid and defensible, along the way, then it
ought to be reasonable to request that it produce a summary of its work-to-date
in a fashion that allows useful, critical review, without having to dive into
the considerable detail of a specification or the wg record.
There is likely to be an added benefit for this, beyond giving ADs practical
input for early- and middle-stage assessment: The rest of the community gets
it, too. And by "the rest of the community", I mean the entire Internet
community, not just IETF participants.
For work of any extended interest, being able to see a summary of on-going work
that looks relevant to them has to be useful for deciding whether to participate
but particularly useful for folks who cannot participate directly but are likely
to be affected by the final output.
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
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